RESTAURANT REVIEW : Chee Chan Mixes Chinese, Vietnamese in a Healthy Menu

A health-conscious Chinese restaurant. Now, that’s what I call a marketing tool.

But upon closer examination, it becomes evident that Chee Chan isn’t exactly a Chinese restaurant. It’s a Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant . . . a health-conscious one, that is.

It seems that owner Chee Henson, a native of Saigon, has simply included her favorite native dishes on a menu that advertises itself as Chinese. But, Henson says, she’s reluctant to call them Vietnamese dishes because she isn’t sure that her customers will want to order them if she does.

Henson should know better. But she is new to this area--she previously ran the Huntington Beach restaurant, Hong Kong Seafood--and must not realize that the Valley restaurant crowd fell off the turnip truck a long, long time ago.

Lucky for us, she is such a terrific cook. She’s also a delightful, energetic woman who greets all her customers with a smile. I’d rate her place as one of the best little Asian restaurants to open this year, despite the fact that the ambience is basic, at best.

It’s a bright, boxy room filled with Chinese shell paintings that clash with a gaudy neon sign that reads “espresso, cappuccino.” (The Vietnamese are inveterate coffee drinkers.) About the only concession to comfort is the pink tablecloths draped grandly over the square tables.

So why all the talk about health? Here’s why: Henson prepares all her food without MSG, using as little oil as the law allows. Whenever she can, she grills rather than sautes. And many of her dishes include fresh raw vegetables--Henson’s is fresh, clean-tasting food that leaves you sated without fullness. It tastes good, too.

One of her best dishes is her house special roll, otherwise known as an imperial roll. This is one of the delights of Vietnamese cuisine: bite-sized rice-paper rolls, lightly fried, filled with a minced mixture of vegetables, chicken, pork, shrimp, crab meat and bean thread noodle. You dip them in a tangy sauce and wrap them up taco-fashion in lettuce and fresh mint. I had mine with a fruit smoothie, made without sugar from strawberries, bananas and peaches.

Many of the soups and appetizers are distinctly Vietnamese, as well as most of the items from the section titled “Charbroiler.” Five-spice soup is just great, a glistening bowlful of noodles, chicken and bean sprouts, full of the perfumes of anise, ginger and garlic. And crab meat with asparagus soup, a Vietnamese banquet dish, has lots of good flavors.

Charcoal-broiled dishes make for more assertive beginnings. My favorite here is the sugar cane shrimp. It’s essentially a forcemeat of minced shrimp, formed around a stick of sugar cane and then charcoal-broiled to a golden brown. You roll it up in a rice-paper crepe that looks like a translucent Handy-Wipe, and eat it with cilantro and mint.

Then there are the more aromatic dishes from the broiler, such as lemon grass pork, chicken and beef, or the unusual herb-wrapped beef. Some of you may have eaten this dish already on the bo 7 mon or “seven courses of beef” set dinner you find in many Vietnamese restaurants. It’s ground beef with ginger in a tiny roll, wrapped in lot leaf of a sweetly medicinal flavor, and then broiled. You get about six to the order, and the taste is indescribable.

Let’s not forget those Chinese dishes, though. The restaurant prepares them with the same flair and eye toward health as everything else. Good appetizers such as cold noodle in spicy peanut sauce is kind of an amalgam of Chinese and Vietnamese flavors. And then there is a purely Chinese appetizer called paper-wrapped chicken: bite-sized bits of sauteed chicken in a spicy sauce served in a steamy aluminum envelope.

Chee Chan features a lot of Chinese seafood dishes. Lover’s shrimp, for instance, a dish you find in many upscale Chinese restaurants, consists of shrimp in two different sauces, a gingery red-colored one and a white sauce made with a wine-rich stock. I wasn’t crazy about crispy fish, a classic recipe that here uses pompano as its foil. The fish, coated in what tasted like a corn batter, was fresh and firm, with properly crunchy skin. I guess I didn’t like the way pompano, an already oily fish, responded to being fried.

All the Chinese classics are available too, on a menu with nearly 100 dishes. You’d better like healthy desserts, because Henson doesn’t much care for sugar. The best you can do here is a not-too-sweet flan and a not-too-sweet flan-like banana pudding.

Wash it all down with Vietnamese iced coffee, made with a filter pot and some condensed milk. How about that cappuccino, the one on the neon sign? Well, let’s say that they better not try using it as a marketing tool just yet. Keep talking about the health stuff.

Recommended dishes: house special rolls, $3.95; paper-wrapped chicken, $3.50; five-spice soup, $3.95; lover’s shrimp, $10.95; lemon grass pork, $6.25.

Chee Chan, 12910 Magnolia Blvd., Sherman Oaks; (818) 763-0083. Lunch and dinner from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; from 1 to 9 p.m. Sunday. No alcoholic beverages. Parking lot. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $15 to $25.